Latest News

Gender

Sharing Best Practices and Lessons Learned for Supporting Women’s Land Rights:

A Debate on the Gender Evaluation Criteria (GEC)

In collaboration with gender-focused organizations that are part of the Rural / Urban Civil Societies Cluster of the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN), the Land Portal is hosting a an online discussion on theGender Evaluation Criteria (GEC) on the Land Portal’s Land Debate. The aim of the discussion is to facilitate a constructive discussion about the experiences and lessons learned in implementing and using the GEC and to share best practices, as well as identify any gaps. This online debate will also familiarize other stakeholders with this GLTN tool, creating opportunities for collaboration and general dissemination of the land tool.

The debate will address the positive and negative aspects, the challenges faced and the positive outcomes of using such a tool as the GEC, willl explore look at other tools that are available and will explore any possibilities for enhancing the GEC. The debate will also address the main characteristics of a tool aimed at promoting women’s land rights.

The discussion is also being held simultaneously on the OECD’s Wikigenderplatform and in partnership with the FSN-Forum. It will be facilitated by the International Land Coalition’s gender team. Results of the discussion will be analyzed and transformed into a report that will be distributed widely among land governance stakeholders.

The debate was launched on January 25, 2016 and will run until February 5, 2016.

Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on the gendered impacts of the contemporary wave of foreign agricultural investments (Behrman, Meinzen-Dick & Quisumbing, 2012; Daley, 2011; Daley & Park, 2012; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2013a–d, 2015; Doss, Summerfield, & Tsikata, 2014). The outcomes of agricultural investments for men and women often differ in rural areas of the Global South where gender inequalities are persistent. Barriers to women’s access to productive resources— production inputs, credit and training—reduce female agricultural producers’ yields by 20–30 per cent from their full potential (FAO, 2011).

Further, culturally based gender discrimination often leaves women with a heavier burden for care work, diminishes their access to education, restricts their access to land and limits options for decent paid work (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [UNCTAD], 2015). The evidence presented in this paper indicates that these inequalities are often exacerbated by foreign agricultural investments, unless investors and host country governments work to ensure that investment contracts address the needs of women farmers and agricultural workers.

The purposes of this paper are three-fold. First, it seeks to analyze the gender-related content of the voluntary sustainability standards (VSSs) and the responsible investment frameworks. Second, it attempts to answer the question “Do VSSs improve gender equality?” And third, it aims to explore how the responsible investment frameworks can build on the successes and failures of the VSSs to improve gender equality in agricultural investment projects.

It uses the experiences of VSSs to provide guidance for responsible investment frameworks because the latter are quite new, and only scant anecdotal evidence about their impacts is available. The research is based on a desk review of the certification criteria and principles of five major VSS initiatives and five responsible investment frameworks, a literature review of the impacts of VSS initiatives on gender inequalities, and a close reading of policy reports and scholarly literature on the main obstacles to gender equality in agriculture, particularly in contexts of foreign direct investment.

Gender equality is one of the 10 implementation principles, and gender is a cross-cutting issue in the VGGT. The guidelines recognise equality between individuals and explicitly highlight women’s and girls’ equal tenure rights in comparison to those of men . Hence, they recognise gender equality and the human right to non-discrimination as they recognise “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable human rights of all individuals” .Further, the VGGT promote “taking positive action, including empowerment, in order to promote equitable tenure rights and access to land, fisheries and forests, for all, women and men within the nationalcontext”

This publication provides an analisys and policy recommendation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGTs) from a Gender Perspective.